The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Some printing devices are configured with a feature known as “locked printing” to provide control over the printing of electronic documents. When a printing device is configured with a locked printing feature and print data is sent to the printing device, a printed version of an electronic document reflected in the print data is not generated until a password is verified at the printing device. Typically a user enters a password through an operation panel on the printing device. The printing device verifies the password and if the password is successfully verified, allows a printed version of the electronic document reflected in the print data to be generated, i.e., printed.
One of the problems with convention locked printing approaches is that setting up the locked printing feature requires that an administrator manually configure a printing device through the operation panel of the printing device. This process is tedious and time consuming and makes implementing locked printing on large deployments of printing devices expensive and time consuming, because of the human resources required.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need for an approach for configuring locked printing on printing devices that does not suffer from limitations of prior approaches.